I actually don’t think pleasure has any inherent value at all. Is it actually the case that the lexical threshold view giving some positive weight to pleasure is more popular? Note that some negative utilitarians may hold that pleasure doesn’t matter (or is lexically dominated by suffering), and also that some intense suffering lexically dominates less intense suffering.
On terminology, I thought the levelling down objection is specifically the objection that making people worse off can be good according to some egalitarian views, and what you’re describing is a sequence argument.
On the first point, would you hold that a world with a billion people with experiences trillions of times better than the best current experience and one pinprick would be morally bad to create?
On the second point, I didn’t realize the leveling down argument had an official name. I’ll fix the terminology issues now.
Which examples of pleasure cannot be explained as contentment, relief, or anticipated relief?
Those are how I currently think of pleasure as being inversely related to craving to change one’s experience. Below are some perhaps useful resources for such views:
On these views, the perfect state is no craving (as far as we look only at the individual herself), and the scale does not go higher than that so to speak. Of course, an open question is whether this is easy to reach without futuristic technology. But I think that perfect contentment is already possible today.
Most of them. The experience of reading a good book, having sex, the joy of helping others, the joy of learning philosophy, and nearly every other happy experience seems distinct from being merely the absence of pain. Very good moments do not merely contain the absence of unpleasantness—they contain good qualia. I think our knowledge of our own mental states is reasonably reliable (our memory of them isn’t though) and we can be pretty confident that our well-being is, in fact, desirable. The anti-phenomenon claim seems strange and run counter to my own view of my experiences. I’m sure it would be possible to find meditators who came to the opposite conclusion about well-being.
I wonder how one could explain the pleasures of learning about a subject as contentment, relief, or anticipated relief. Maybe they’d describe it as getting rid of the suffering-inducing desire to get knowledge / acceptation from peers / whatever motivates people to learn?
I’m sure it would be possible to find meditators who came to the opposite conclusion about well-being.
If someone reading this happens to know of any I’d be interested to know! I wouldn’t be that surprised if they were very rare, since my (layman) impression is that Buddhism aligns well with suffering-focused ethics, and I assume most meditators are influenced by Buddhism.
Pleasures of learning may be explained by closing open loops, which include unsatisfied curiosity and reflection-based desires for resolving contradictions. And I think anticipated relief is implicitly tracking not only the unmet needs of our future self, but also the unmet needs of others, which we have arguably ‘cognitively internalized’ (from our history of growing up in an interpersonal world).
Descriptively, some could say that pleasure does exist as a ‘separable’ phenomenon, but deny that it has any independently aggregable axiological value. Tranquilism says that its pursuit is only valuable insofar as there was a craving for its presence in the first place. Anecdotally, at least one meditator friend agreed that pleasure is something one can ‘point to’ (and that it can be really intense in some jhana states), but denied that those states are all that interesting compared to the freedom from cravings, which also seems like the main point in most of Buddhism.
On the first point, would you hold that a world with a billion people with experiences trillions of times better than the best current experience and one pinprick would be morally bad to create?
I don’t think any world would be good to create in itself, including an extremely blissful world without any suffering, so it’s at best neutral.
If the pinprick creates a preference against the overall experience (not just that another experience would be better) or a negative overall experience, then I would say that creating that world is bad, but barely so, only as bad as that pinprick.
I actually don’t think pleasure has any inherent value at all. Is it actually the case that the lexical threshold view giving some positive weight to pleasure is more popular? Note that some negative utilitarians may hold that pleasure doesn’t matter (or is lexically dominated by suffering), and also that some intense suffering lexically dominates less intense suffering.
On terminology, I thought the levelling down objection is specifically the objection that making people worse off can be good according to some egalitarian views, and what you’re describing is a sequence argument.
On the first point, would you hold that a world with a billion people with experiences trillions of times better than the best current experience and one pinprick would be morally bad to create?
On the second point, I didn’t realize the leveling down argument had an official name. I’ll fix the terminology issues now.
Which examples of pleasure cannot be explained as contentment, relief, or anticipated relief?
Those are how I currently think of pleasure as being inversely related to craving to change one’s experience. Below are some perhaps useful resources for such views:
Tranquilism — Axiological view by Gloor (2017).
Pleasure does not exist how you think it does (positive valence explained as an anti-phenomenon) — 15-minute video by a meditator, who claims to have done all the jhanas and other phenomenological investigation, and concluded that pleasure is an ‘anti-phenomenon’ devoid of any kind of independent essence.
On these views, the perfect state is no craving (as far as we look only at the individual herself), and the scale does not go higher than that so to speak. Of course, an open question is whether this is easy to reach without futuristic technology. But I think that perfect contentment is already possible today.
Most of them. The experience of reading a good book, having sex, the joy of helping others, the joy of learning philosophy, and nearly every other happy experience seems distinct from being merely the absence of pain. Very good moments do not merely contain the absence of unpleasantness—they contain good qualia. I think our knowledge of our own mental states is reasonably reliable (our memory of them isn’t though) and we can be pretty confident that our well-being is, in fact, desirable. The anti-phenomenon claim seems strange and run counter to my own view of my experiences. I’m sure it would be possible to find meditators who came to the opposite conclusion about well-being.
I wonder how one could explain the pleasures of learning about a subject as contentment, relief, or anticipated relief. Maybe they’d describe it as getting rid of the suffering-inducing desire to get knowledge / acceptation from peers / whatever motivates people to learn?
If someone reading this happens to know of any I’d be interested to know! I wouldn’t be that surprised if they were very rare, since my (layman) impression is that Buddhism aligns well with suffering-focused ethics, and I assume most meditators are influenced by Buddhism.
Pleasures of learning may be explained by closing open loops, which include unsatisfied curiosity and reflection-based desires for resolving contradictions. And I think anticipated relief is implicitly tracking not only the unmet needs of our future self, but also the unmet needs of others, which we have arguably ‘cognitively internalized’ (from our history of growing up in an interpersonal world).
Descriptively, some could say that pleasure does exist as a ‘separable’ phenomenon, but deny that it has any independently aggregable axiological value. Tranquilism says that its pursuit is only valuable insofar as there was a craving for its presence in the first place. Anecdotally, at least one meditator friend agreed that pleasure is something one can ‘point to’ (and that it can be really intense in some jhana states), but denied that those states are all that interesting compared to the freedom from cravings, which also seems like the main point in most of Buddhism.
I don’t think any world would be good to create in itself, including an extremely blissful world without any suffering, so it’s at best neutral.
If the pinprick creates a preference against the overall experience (not just that another experience would be better) or a negative overall experience, then I would say that creating that world is bad, but barely so, only as bad as that pinprick.